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Amazon’s bullying of the book publisher Hachette and the uninvited bid by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox to swallow rival TimeWarner has caused some economists and commentators to ask, why are such aggressive moves not attracting the attention of the Justice Department’s trust-busters? Both moves are textbook examples of how monopoly power can abuse -- or so they would have seemed not long ago.

from Nicholas Wapshott:

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The acquittal of Rupert Murdoch’s favorite executive, the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks, on charges of phone hacking and destroying the evidence might have marked the final act in one of the most bruising and expensive chapters in the history of News Corp.

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It is easy to imagine the look on the faces of Rupert Murdoch’s children when they read the obituaries of New York Times owner Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, whose father thought him too stupid to run the company. Particularly when they came to the line: “It’s impossible to be an assistant to your father.”

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Mitt Romney must be wondering where it all went wrong. With the president presiding over a jobless, barely perceptible recovery, with most Americans thinking Obama is on the wrong track, and with his healthcare legislation widely derided, the Republican champion should be coasting by now. Yet Romney has been languishing in the head-to-head polls for almost a year, and prominent conservative commentators are complaining.

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Rupert Murdoch should never go on holiday. It only makes him grumpy. He returned last month from cruising on his yacht off the coast of Croatia looking for a scrap. When Steve Jobs invented the iPad, he could hardly have imagined the havoc caused by one crabby old geezer letting rip on Twitter. Murdoch, a genius with the snappy tabloid headline, didn’t need all 140 characters to reduce Romney’s campaign to toast. “Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless [Romney] drops old friends from team and hires some real pros,” he wrote, adding the fatal one-word zinger: “Doubtful.”

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Watching Tony Blair appear this week before the British judicial inquiry into press standards in London has left me feeling a little queasy. What began as an open-minded investigation into how to protect individuals from the snooping of the press in the age of the Internet has turned into a show trial to shame politicians who fell under the spell of Rupert Murdoch.

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The headlines screaming from London tell the story: Murdoch “unfit” to run News Corp. The Commons committee that summoned the 81-year-old media magnate to explain how his newspapers came to hack the phones of everyone from Prince William to Paul McCartney has given its damning verdict.

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On the night Queen Elizabeth scampered back from her Scottish castle to address an angry crowd outside Buckingham Palace – the crowd protesting she hadn’t paid enough respect to the memory of Princess Diana, killed in a car crash the week before – Rupert Murdoch was in the newsroom of the London Times. “There’s your headline,” he told the editor in charge. “Queen Saves Neck!” It was a perfect tabloid headline for a perfect tabloid story.